I don't know what everyone is so upset about. These guys are just traditionalists. Good old fashioned conservative traditionalists. It is the American Way.
"Everybdy is talkin' these days about Tammany men growin' rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin' the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There's all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself... but I've not gone in for dishonest graft—blackmailin' gamblers, saloon-keepers, disorderly people—and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics. There's an honest graft.... I'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place.... I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land.... Ain't it perfectly honest to chare a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that's honest graft."
- George Washington Plunkitt, a ward boss for Tammany Hall in New York City, 1905
[from William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (New York: Knopf, 1948), 3-4.]
shmoop.com
I don't think any of this would have come out if they hadn't run their "traffic study" on the GWB. At least, it wouldn't have come out now. In a way, the Republicans are lucky--it might have come out in 2016 while Christy was running, and would have been a large black shadow over the primaries. |
